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*Harry Mathews. Cigarettes. 1987

This is an intricately plotted novel that I have read many times. One of the pleasures of rereading it is in having forgotten many details large and small. Each chapter is based on a dyad of two characters. The focus shifts from one set of characters to another, but the last chapters bring you back to the starting point once again. The novel is written on Oulipean principles, but these are invisible. You feel there is a hidden, inexorable structure, but you cannot reconstruct it from the novel itself.

One of my favorite novels. I've always preferred the Sorrentino / Mathews branch of novelistic posmodernism to the Gaddis/Pynchon branch.